“The Chancery Records Index Goes Online.”
Those words in the November/December 2000 issue of the Library of Virginia newsletter launched what would eventually evolve into one of the agency’s most-used digital collections–The Chancery Records Index (CRI). For those of us who were here at its inception, it is hard to believe that a quarter-century has passed, but the present-day size and scope of the project speaks to many hands that have contributed to it over the years.
Initially geared primarily toward genealogists, the chancery project began as an access point for microfilmed chancery papers from local courthouses around the Commonwealth. The surnames index gave microfilm reel and image citations for individual case files that had been flat-filed and indexed, either by grant-funded field staff in the courthouses or local government records staff at the Library. The microfilm reels were available to researchers at both the Library of Virginia, including through interlibrary loan, and the local circuit court clerks’ offices.
Very shortly, this process resulted in the creation of thousands of reels of microfilm. However, it also necessitated that the Circuit Court Records Preservation (CCRP) grants program assist clerks with acquiring microfilm reader-printers for their offices so that researchers could view and print the images.
In just a few years, the growing prevalence of the internet triggered a reevaluation of the project’s output. We asked ourselves, what is the best way to make these records accessible to the public? Will this internet thingy catch on?
In 2002, Fauquier County received a $244,000 CCRP grant for a pilot project to digitize their pre-1913 chancery causes. The resulting 340,000 images represented the chancery project’s first steps into the digital era.
The CRI now contains nearly 14 million images from 102 localities. Hidden within those numbers are dozens of local records archivists, hundreds of thousands of hours of labor, and millions of dollars in conservation and digital reformatting work that went into making these valuable local court records freely accessible online.
Every year, tens of thousands of researchers from across the United States, as well as many from overseas, utilize the CRI to discover family history, learn more about the past in a Virginia county or city, trace decades of property ownership, document the history of various religious denominations, or explore other historical information in order to write books and scholarly articles.
What makes chancery causes so useful to researchers? Chancery causes can contain a depth of first-hand information on individuals, localities, and regions, that can be found in few other records. Even recognizing their historical limitations regarding point-of-view (primarily white and male), they can often offer details about under-represented groups–women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and indigenous people–not commonly recorded in other types of government records.
Over the years, our agency blog has highlighted many stories found in chancery causes. Sometimes the narratives provide historical details and context, like those about the enslaved at Buffalo Forge (Augusta County), Flora’s quest for freedom (Montgomery County), or Liberian emigrants (Prince Edward County). Other stories offer unique insights into the experiences of those who lived before us, such as the Payne family (Frederick County) or a man impressed on a British Man o’ War (Northumberland County). Admittedly, as writers, many of us are drawn to the quirky or bizarre tales that also occasionally come to light, like a ghostly divorce (Scott County), the Christmas airplane (Arlington County), the Boer War Spectacular (Norfolk County), or a Circus Intrusion (Smyth County).
So what does the future hold for the digital chancery project? First and foremost, we continue the work of making more chancery causes available through the CRI. At any given time, there is a chancery collection being scanned, a chancery collection receiving conservation treatment, and several chancery collections being processed, indexed, and flat-filed.
Over the last decade or so, local records processing archivists have been adding some new indexing that will hopefully make chancery causes even more useful to researchers. Using a limited vocabulary of terms, newly processed localities (and a few previously processed ones) have been indexed noting causes of action (i.e. the reason for the suit) and topics (i.e. broad descriptions of a few major subjects in the suit). Regular users of the CRI may have noticed these notations on the scanned images of folders in the index. Our goal, in the not-too-distant-future, is to make these terms searchable in the index to aid those users interested in topical research rather than just specific surnames.
Not long after I began working on the digital chancery project in 2006, we hung a large Virginia state map overlayed with Mylar on the wall. The plastic allowed us to color in a locality when its chancery records had been digitized. It helped us to see our incremental progress toward a somewhat overwhelming goal–digitizing all surviving pre-1913 chancery causes in the Commonwealth.
Local Records wall map indicating localities with scanned chancery causes.
We still have that map on the wall. It’s our one offline hold out. That big map was very, very white when I joined Local Government Records. It is much less so now thanks to an intrepid team of archival professionals, numerous forward-thinking elected officials, our unflappable paper conservator, and a host of digital reformatting specialists.
